Mignolo’s Epistemology
of Coloniality
Linda Martín Alcoff
Syracuse University
walter mignolo’s epistemological claims about subaltern knowledge owe much for their inspiration to the work of Michel Foucault. Thus
it is little wonder that, in some important respects, Mignolo bears a similar
relationship as Foucault to the discipline of philosophy, and to epistemology
in particular. Even though the entirety of Foucault’s theoretical writings concerned knowledge in the human sciences, the principal discussions in AngloAmerican epistemology continue to ignore Foucault’s work, an inattention
considered justified on the grounds that Foucault’s analyses of knowledge
are taken to be a species of critical sociology, not normative epistemology.
It is also largely believed that Foucault repudiated the very possibility of the
normative goals of epistemology given the constitutive relationality between
power and knowledge.
Yet Foucault himself formulated that relationality as dyadic rather than
reductive, insisting that knowledge is not reducible to power, even though
it cannot be properly understood as disassociated from power (Foucault
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1980; Alcoff 1996). Power operates not only in the spheres of application and
discovery—the two spheres traditional epistemologists acknowledge as affected by “irrational” elements—but also in the spheres of justification and
the delimitation of the “regime” (or sphere) of the truth, or what passes for
truth. Foucault worked out these claims with detailed case studies that both
supported them and elucidated their meaning. For those of us who found
these arguments plausible, even persuasive, the normative implications
are clear: epistemology needs to work with this better and more truthful
description of how actually existing knowledges (as opposed to idealized
reconstructions) emerge, and needs to incorporate not only an analysis
of power in its analysis of knowledge but also a set of normative criteria
for judging various relationships between power and knowledge. Foucault
provided such criteria in his epistemic assessments of hegemony-seeking
versus subjugated knowledges: subjugated or local knowledges always tend
to do less violence to the local particulars and are also less likely to impose
hierarchical structures of credibility based on universal claims about the
proper procedures of justification that foreclose the contributions of many
unconventional or lower-status knowers.
Like Foucault, Mignolo has also spent a considerable amount of time
analyzing knowledge in its relationship to power and presenting case studies of hegemony-seeking power-knowledges that arose in the context of
European colonialism. For Mignolo, the epistemic effects of colonialism are
among its most damaging, far-reaching, and least understood. Also like Foucault, Mignolo’s critical project has produced new conceptual formulations
in the attempt to explain and describe colonial knowledge practices and
anti-colonial epistemic resistance. The question of how these new concepts
fit with the existing problematics of epistemology has given rise to a similar
cognitive dissonance, which it will be the project of this article to reduce.
One of the main problems in Foucault’s work was his own colonial unconscious, however, and here his influence on Mignolo comes to a striking
end. Foucault characterized the formation of disciplinary power-knowledge
regimes as originating within Europe, and he presented the development of
the modern episteme in such a way that divorced it from its colonial context.
New publications of Foucault’s lectures from the 1970s reveal a sustained
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discussion of race on his part, and a real attempt to understand the formative
role that constructions of race have played in the processes of governmentality and especially in the development of bio-power. Yet in these lectures, he
does not thematize race or colonialism in his analyses of knowledge.1
Many of Foucault’s followers, however, seem untroubled by this approach. Perhaps they accept the common view that colonialism is related
to power, to juridical forms of management and to evaluative conceptions
of difference, and to conceptions of the human, but not necessarily to the
European Enlightenment’s theory of knowledge, which was, after all, openly
anti-authoritarian. The Enlightenment took on as one of its main projects
to critique the scholasticism and authoritarianism of the religious-based
epistemologies of premodern Europe (Tiles 1993). How can such a project
be supportive of colonialism? Further, how can an analysis of colonialism
aid not only in the critical project of identifying the latent Eurocentrism still
operating in our major concepts but also in the positive project of reformulating and reconstructing epistemic norms? If the answer to both questions
is yes, then we will have shown that epistemology itself needs to incorporate
an analysis of coloniality.
Mignolo’s work has answered yes to both questions. He has been in critical dialogue with Foucault’s conceptualization of subjugated knowledges,
appropriating and critiquing as well as re-adapting this concept to the case
of colonized knowledges. He has theorized the relationship of knowledge to
power squarely within a colonial context, even right up unto the present day
in his recent arguments against poststructuralism and postmodernism. This
analysis has both critical and reconstructive implications for epistemology,
especially his critique of colonial knowledge, his call for a geopolitical analysis of knowledge, and his articulation and defense of border gnosis.
Many Latin American philosophers—from Leopoldo Zea to Enrique
Dussel to Mignolo and others—have pointed out the hierarchical patterns
of epistemic judgment under colonial systems. As Zea succinctly put it, the
identity, the rationality, and the very humanity of the peoples of the “New
World” were “put on trial and judged by the jury of its conquerors” (Zea
1988–89, 36). Amerindian peoples were not considered to be in a position to
present their own epistemic credentials, much less to judge European ones.
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This fact is clear. What is also clear is that extra-epistemic concerns are being
used to do epistemic work in cases where, for example, one’s ethnic or racialized identity determines one’s epistemic justification or the status of one’s
beliefs. But these facts do not, for most epistemologists, have normative epistemological significance. Conquerors used bad epistemic practices, and it is
assumed that the effort to establish good epistemic practices can only take
negative lessons from such examples. However, we might also ask, following
both Charles Mills (1997) and Michele Le Doeuff (1991) who have asked similar
questions: what is the relationship between the project of conquest and this
reliance on bad epistemic practices? Could it be that conquerors are in an
epistemically poor cultural, intellectual, and political context for judgment,
and are more likely to develop what Mills calls “epistemologies of ignorance”
that include substantive cognitive practices that obscure social realities? If
so, this would indicate that in developing an account of best practices, we
need to consider more than individual epistemic agency and include a much
broader array of structural background conditions that directly enhance or
inhibit the pursuit and identification of truth.
The relationship between justificatory status and one’s social identity is
not, of course, foreign to the traditions of Western epistemology. In both
ancient and modern canonical writings, epistemic credibility is associated
with identity, and sometimes determined by it. Gender, age, one’s status as a
slave, the sort of work one performed, ethnic identities such as Jewishness,
and since the modern period, one’s racialized features were variously used
to assess epistemic competence by philosophers including Plato, Aristotle,
Bacon, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel. (For an interesting take on the modern prejudices, see Shapin 1994.)
Thus, identity-based assessments were integrated into epistemic practice
as well as into epistemologies that justified favoring certain groups over others with a measure of presumptive credibility. Much of Mignolo’s analytics
of epistemology, as we’ll see, concerns its role in creating, developing, and
maintaining a hierarchy of knowledge and knowers particularly adapted for
colonialism, in which the most relevant distinction concerned one’s cultural
identity. Much of Mignolo’s attempt to formulate an alternative to this imperial epistemology involves an effort to topple the cultural hierarchy that
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colonialism enforced. But more than this, “subaltern reason,” as he calls it,
must aim to “rethink and reconceptualize the stories that have been told
and the conceptualization that has been put into place to divide the world
between Christians and pagans, civilized and barbarians, modern and premodern, and developed and undeveloped regions and people,” especially to
the extent such divisions are based on putative cognitive capacity (2000b,
98). Such a reconstructive project demands not only a new sociology of
knowledge but also a new normative epistemology that can correct and
improve upon the colonial worldview.
In the following section I offer a summary of Mignolo’s main lines of
critique of Western epistemology, before turning in the next section to his
constructive epistemological project. Then at the end, I will return to two
normative questions that are raised by his work on epistemology, but not
fully answered: the question of truth, and the question of identity.
I. Critique
“Modernity” was imagined as the house of epistemology.
—Walter Mignolo (2006, 93)
Together with Enrique Dussel, his fellow Argentine exile, and Anibal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist, Mignolo’s main argument throughout his corpus
has been that modernity emerged from colonialism, not after it nor simply
alongside. Colonialism is constitutive of modernity, of its teleological macronarratives of human progress, and of the material base necessary to provide
both the surplus and the self-representation required to imagine Europe
as the vanguard of the human race. To put this another way, colonialism is
constitutive of both the base and the superstructure of modernity.
From Quijano, Mignolo has taken up the idea of a coloniality of power to
refer to the system that organized the distribution of epistemic, moral, and
aesthetic resources in a way that both reflects and reproduces empire (Quijano 1998). The concept of coloniality of power allows us to think through
how the colonized were subjected not simply to a rapacious exploitation of
all their resources but also to a hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge systems.
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It allows us to understand the constitutive relationship between the historical a priori of European thought and its off-shore adventures. It also allows
us to think through the Anglo- and Eurocentric structure of thought and
representation that continues to dominate much of the world today, whether
or not, in a given place and time, formal national liberation has been won.
From Dussel, Mignolo took up the idea of transmodernity, which signifies
the global networks within which European modernity itself became possible.
Transmodernity operates to displace the teleological and linear progression
of modernity and postmodernity, rendering even the most anti-Western
postmodernists still complicit with the temporal concepts of colonialism that
erased the colonial difference. Whereas the concepts of modernity and postmodernity maintain the Eurocentric imaginary timeline of Greece → Rome
→ Renaissance → Modern World, relegating the colonized areas of the world
as peripheral to the main story, the concept of transmodernity is intended
by Dussel to displace that timeline with a spatialization in which the whole
planet is involved at every stage in history. If modernity is imagined to be
European, transmodernity is planetary, with principle players from all parts
of the globe.
Both Dussel and Quijano have developed their concepts of transmodernity and of the coloniality of power, respectively, with a strong linkage to
questions of knowledge and questions of reason. Quijano writes that the
concept “coloniality of power” implies “the hegemony of Eurocentrism as
epistemological perspective”(quoted in Mignolo 2000, 54). And for Dussel,
transmodernity must be accompanied by what he calls a “liberating reason”
as an alternative to the imperial, ego-logical reason of cartesian colonial
modernity (see esp. 1995). But even more than these and other theorists of
colonialism, it is Walter Mignolo who has focused on the epistemological
effects of colonialism. Since the publication in 1995 of The Darker Side of the
Renaissance, Mignolo’s central focus in his subsequent work, including the
collection of essays Local Histories/Global Designs and in several essays that
have appeared in journals and anthologies, has been on the subordination of
non-European modes of knowing, conceptualization, and representation.
Hegemony in Mignolo’s usage of the term is very much taken from the
Gramscian idea of hegemony as the construction of mass consent. That is,
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hegemony is achieved through a project of persuasion that works principally
through claims to truth. Europe is ahead because Europe is smarter and
more reflective than the rest of the world; the United States has the right to
hog the world’s resources because it knows best how to make use of them.
Leading liberals like Arthur Schlesinger make the claim for Western epistemic
supremacy without any embarrassment: Schlesinger claims not that Europe
(and the U.S. as a European nation) has made no mistakes, but that Europe
alone invented the scientific method, which gave it the capacity to critique its
mistakes. Moreover, he claims that, although every culture “has done terrible
things,” “whatever the particular crimes of Europe, that continent is also the
source—the unique source—of those liberating ideas . . . to which most of the
world today aspires. These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor
Middle eastern ideas, except by adoption”(Schlesinger 1992, 127; emphasis in
original). The result of the wide acceptance of such hegemonic claims in the
United States and in Europe is a broad-based consent to imperial war as the
presumptive entitlement of the political vanguard of the human race; the
result of the acceptance of such hegemonic claims in the colonized world
includes such symptomatic effects as the ones Samuel Ramos and Octavio
Paz described when they said that Mexicans have an alienated relationship
to their own temporal reality, and that they imagine the real present as occurring somewhere else than where they live. The temporal displacement
or alienation of space, which causes the colonized person to be unable to
experience their own time as the now and instead to see that “now” as occurring in another space, is the result of a Eurocentric organization of time
in which time is measured by the developments in technological knowledge,
the gadget porn of iPods and BlackBerrys, and the languages in which that
technological knowledge is developed. Who is developing the latest gadgets?
What language do they speak? These questions show us where the “now”
resides, and thus, who is “behind.”
In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), Hegel works through a phenomenology of subjectivity precisely by beginning with the reference points “here”
and “now.” These are terms whose meaning cannot be elucidated without
reference to a specific spatio-temporally located consciousness; we cannot
judge either the justification or the meaning of a claim about “here” or about
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“now” without knowing its specific context of reference. From these common
indexicals, Hegel meant to show that all knowledge is similarly indexed to a
specific subject, place, and time, in the sense that knowledge is dependent on
justificatory procedures, measuring instruments, theoretical and metaphysical
framing concepts, and categories of analysis that are intelligible within a given
located domain—a fact that should not lead us to skepticism, in his view, but
to see that to understand the world we need first to understand ourselves.
This explains why it is so important that the relationship between the
colonized subject and its “here” and “now” is displaced by the colonial
imaginary. If the knowing subject is the point of reference around which all
knowledge claims revolve, what happens when that subject has only an indirect and long-distance relationship to its own “here” and “now,” or when it
has what Ramos called an alienated account of its own reality (Ramos 1962)?
The result is that it can no longer serve as the reference point for knowledge,
or judge the adequacy of claims of justification. It no longer knows.
For Ramos, Paz, Zea, Edouard Glissant, and the many others in this
tradition who identified colonial alienation of consciousness, the solution
to alienation is a positional shift to “our America” in which a philosophy
reflective of its own Latin American reality might be developed. In his most
recent work, The Idea of Latin America (2005), Mignolo expresses doubts
about this alternative Latin America construction, predicated as it is on another exclusionary paradigm. Before we can go about the process of developing a new philosophy and new account of “our” reality, he argues, we need
a more extensive period of epistemological reflection. We need to develop
a decolonial critical theory that will be more thoroughly delinked from the
contemporary variants of the modern imperial designs of the recent past.
The fact that language, space, time, and history have all been colonized
through the colonization of knowledge must give us pause before we borrow the founding concepts of Eurocentric thought, such as center/periphery,
tradition/modernity, and primitive/civilized, or the very evaluative binary
structure that grounds these. Mignolo develops Quijano’s concept of the coloniality of power, then, as a way to name that set of framing and organizing assumptions that justify hierarchies and make it almost impossible to evaluate
alternative claims. Why was it said that there were no pre-Colombian books
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or forms of writing, when it was known that the codices had been raided and
burned in heaps? How could the claim that modernity represented an expansion of freedom not be challenged by its development within the context of
colonialism? Why do we continue to conceptualize rationality as separate
from and properly in dominion over the realm of affect, a distinctly Greek
and nonindigenous notion, as Mariategui showed many decades ago? Why
is it considered sufficient, even exemplary, to have one Latin Americanist in
a university history department in the United States, when 5 or 10 or even 15
Europeanists are required? And in philosophy departments, it is not necessary to have a single one.
To think through and beyond these persistent limitations in Western
knowledge practices, Mignolo argues that we need to reinscribe what he calls
the “colonial difference” into the order of representation. If the Eurocentric
imaginary of modernity has forgotten colonialism and relegated the colonized spaces to the periphery and to the past in its description of universal
reality (even if that “past” paradoxically exists in the “present”), the task of
the colonial difference is to reinscribe simultaneity. To make “our America”
no longer considered peripheral and behind the “now,” hierarchical and binary categories must be replaced with pluralist and egalitarian ones.
Mignolo’s concept of the colonial difference is thus an attempt to reveal
and displace the logic of the same by which Europeans have represented their
others. Non-Europeans are seen as existing on the same historical trajectory,
but further behind; their goals are the same, but not achieved to the same
degree; their knowledge is subject to the same justificatory procedures, but
it is less well-developed. In this way, true otherness or difference is invisible
and unintelligible. By use of the term “colonial difference,” Mignolo seeks to
break out of this logic of the same. He seeks both to reveal the way in which
power has been at work in creating that difference (that is, the way in which
colonialism creates “backwardness” both materially and ideologically) as
well as the way in which colonial power represents and evaluates difference.
The coloniality of power, in other words, produces, evaluates, and manages
the colonial difference.
Now here let me signal one of the issues of critical debate I want to raise
later on in the paper: What is the nature of the difference that Mignolo
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means to signify by the term “colonial difference”? Is it an absolute or a relative difference; that is, does it stand alone or is it dependent on its relation to
Eurocentrism? Is it, like the concept of race, an epiphenomena of colonialism
itself, or does it preexist the colonial encounter in the way that Dussel suggests that “living labor” preexists capitalism? What, in other words, is the
metaphysical status of the colonial difference?
I will return to this question, but here let me conclude this summary
exposition of Mignolo’s critique of Western epistemology before turning to
his more constructive rebuilding of knowledge. First, we need to understand
where Mignolo’s critique of Western epistemology fits within the internal
debates within Western philosophy itself, in which binary concepts and
absolutist accounts of knowledge have come under so much criticism since
the turn away from positivism (a trend that has occurred in both the analytic
and continental traditions). One good way to illuminate his relationship to
this internal Western critique is to look at Mignolo’s changed relationship to
the tradition of hermeneutics.
Within the debates of Western epistemology, hermeneutics, as the
science of interpretation that focuses on understanding rather than mere
propositional knowledge, is often portrayed as the other of epistemology,
its more expansive sibling, or its gentler, kinder face. Because hermeneutics
recognizes the interpretive step involved in all understanding, thus making
it possible to pluralize meaning, many see hermeneutics as less prone to
imperialism than epistemology proper. For epistemology in the Cartesian
tradition, to note the role of the situation of the knower is to submit to
relativism, and to acknowledge the ubiquity of interpretive frames would
be to invite skepticism. Knowledge is either imperial or it does not exist. For
hermeneutics, by contrast, the situated-ness of knowers, what Gadamer calls
“prejudgement” and Heidegger calls “foreknowledge,” that works to situate
both knower and known in time and space, is a precondition of knowledge
and not the sign of its demise. Just as Hegel showed that “here” and “now”
cannot be elucidated outside of a context, so hermeneutics argues that
knowledge is not intelligible outside of a tradition.
Much of Mignolo’s critique of epistemology concerns its inability to acknowledge its location, the undeniable fact of its local history. Epistemology’s
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hegemonic effects are tied to its denial of its own spatial locality. Western
epistemology systematically delocalized knowledge, Mignolo argues (2000b,
22, 41). So one might reasonably wonder why Mignolo rejects hermeneutics
as vigorously as he rejects epistemology, given hermeneutic’s acknowledgement of the local foundation of all truth.
The reason is because Mignolo sees hermeneutics (at least in his more recent work) as the corollary of epistemology, not its true other. Epistemology’s
proper focus is scientific knowledge; hermeneutics’ proper focus is meaning
and understanding. Both domains, however, are represented without the
colonial difference. The question of what is meaningful or intelligible, in
other words, is no less subject to colonial representations than the question
of what is true (9). Both are judged within a European frame of reference.
At one point Mignolo was adopting the phrase “pluritopic hermeneutics,”
following Raimundo Panikkar, to signify the way in which a hermeneutic
approach might be cured of its Eurocentrism and provide a real alternative to monological and imperial unified standards of reference. Pluritopic
hermeneutics, as opposed to the usual monotopic hermeneutics one finds in
Gadamer, Heidegger, and the European tradition generally, does not assume
there exists one single unified historical culture with which new meanings
must be “fused,” to use Gadamer’s term. Rather, pluritopic hermeneutics
assumes no central frame or unified tradition at all and thus opens up the
determination of meaning to multiple possibilities even within the same
historical horizon.
However, Mignolo has recently backed off from using the concept of
pluritopic hermeneutics as a positive alternative. His adoption of pluritopic
hermeneutics was aligned with the project of colonial semiosis, which aimed
to effect a rerepresentation of the colonized other to free it from the hegemonic terms of Eurocentric conceptual imagery. That is, colonial semiosis
is a way of revealing the multiple realities covered over by colonial systems
of meaning. The point is not simply to reveal multiplicity, but to reveal the
lines of tension and conflict, or the points of contradiction, between colonizing and colonized spaces. Thus, he explained, “colonial semiosis require[d]
a pluritopic hermeneutics since in the conflict, in the cracks and fissures
where the conflict originates, a description of one side of the epistemological
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divide won’t do” (17). We need to be able to see multiple sign systems at work,
and under negotiation and contestation, in any given field of meaning.
But now, Mignolo claims that both epistemology and hermeneutics,
whether monotopic or pluritopic, need to be transcended since they have
both presupposed a subject-object distinction, with epistemology focused
on the de-subjectified object and hermeneutics focused on the non-objective
subject. He explains that
“Border thinking” is the notion that I am introducing now with the intention of transcending hermeneutics and epistemology and the corresponding
distinction between the knower and the known. . . . To describe “in reality”
both sides of the border [which, I take it, he understands a pluritopic hermeneutics to be attempting to do] is not the problem. The problem is to do it
from its exteriority. . . . The goal is to erase the distinction between knower
and known, between a “hybrid” object (the borderland as the known) and
a “pure” disciplinary or interdisciplinary subject (the knower), uncontaminated by the border matters he or she describes. To change the terms of the
conversation it is necessary to overcome the distinction between subject and
object, on the one hand, and between epistemology and hermeneutics on
the other.2 (18)
I think he is making two points here. The first is that, although the interpretive
reflexivity of hermeneutics might allow one to represent “both sides” (that
is, colonizer and colonized) by bringing in the spatial location of meaning,
this is not a sufficient corrective, or even the best way to articulate the goal,
because it leaves unanalyzed the formation of the representational divide
itself. We need to take a further step back to reach the level of exteriority
where representations are made possible in the first place. It is not enough
to acknowledge the interpretive frame if that frame itself is not theorized
in relation to coloniality and its construction of the colonial difference. His
second point is that hermeneutics is still implicated in the ontological bifurcation of subject and object presupposed by epistemology. This unmediated
approach blocks our ability to critique the mediations by which objects are
constructed, and then known.
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I remain unconvinced that hermeneutics presupposes an unmediated
subject-object opposition, because it comes precisely out of a Hegelian rejection of such dualism, and because the concept of horizon works effectively
to show that neither understanding nor truth can be accounted for if we
accept such bifurcations. In general, Mignolo is often operating with what
appears as an overly simplified account of Western philosophical positions,
although simplifications are understandable and arguably even necessary
to try to think at the very broad level of coloniality. And moreover, for those
(like me, at least occasionally) who want to remind Mignolo and others of
the complexity of the Western epistemological tradition, we would still be
rightfully called to account for the uniform way in which that very complex
tradition effects a simplification and repudiation of non-Western thought.
That is, if Western epistemology is truly complex, as it would certainly seem
if one sets Putnam or Quine or Brandom against Frege or Russell or Popper,
then how does one explain the lack of complexity in the way in which most
Western philosophers attend to the thought that originates from feminists
or any of those outside the West? Western epistemology’s internal complexity is somehow able to coexist with a uniform resistance to engaging with
the implications of the fact that its own historical genealogy precisely maps
onto the period of European colonialism. For this reason I believe we should
consider seriously Mignolo’s insistent claim in recent years that paradigms
originating in the West do not need to be “expanded” or “pluralized” but
more robustly transcended.
In some respects Mignolo suggests that the cause of the problem is less in
content than in goal. The target of his critique is rarely the content of specific
epistemological positions or theories but rather of their imperial assumptions and scope of application. The philosophy of science, for example, never
presents itself as the philosophy of Western science, but as the philosophy
of science tout court. This leads me to the last aspect of Mignolo’s critique of
epistemology I want to discuss before turning to the constructive project: his
argument with social science. Mignolo takes issue with Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea that the social sciences need to be “opened up,” arguing that
instead of being opened up, they need to be superceded. Wallerstein wants
to open up the social sciences to a more planetary enterprise, to transcend
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the segregated model of area studies in favor of a unified domain of inquiry.
Thus he wants to expand their scope and range of reference as a way to
correct for Anglo- and Eurocentrism. The problem with this plan, Mignolo
suggests, citing Orlando Fals-Borda, Vine Deloria, and others to support him,
is that “opening is not the same as decolonizing” (2000a, 80). The project of
opening up without decolonizing runs the risk of simply furthering colonial
expansion if the methodology remains “dependent on the epistemology of
North Atlantic modernity—the norms of the disciplines and the problems
of the North Atlantic” (80), that is, on the conceptual imagery of colonial
epistemologies.
For Mignolo, the basic problem is that the systems of knowing and
representing that developed in European modernity were constituted by
and within the coloniality of power. Thus, Mignolo has moved further and
further afield of traditional Western philosophical concepts in his attempt
to disentangle his approach to knowledge from the snares of colonizing assumptions. For this, as the recent critical discussion in South Atlantic Quarterly indicates, he is losing some of his postmodern allies. Postmodernists,
however radical their critiques, are rarely in the business of reconstructing
epistemic norms, a project that in the next section I will argue has engaged
Mignolo.
II. Reconstruction
The concepts just discussed—coloniality of power, the colonial difference,
and colonial semiosis—can be thought of as conceptual tools for decolonizing both the metaphysics and epistemology—what there is and what we
know—of contemporary thought. They also provide a lexicon for methodologies in the social sciences and humanities. Clearly, Mignolo has taken
up and developed these concepts as a way to aid in the reassessment and
rearticulation of temporal grand metanarratives, as well as to assist in more
local projects of analysis, such as assessments of indigenous movements
in particular places. Still, these concepts are born out of a foundation of
critique: a critical analysis of the ways in which colonialism still infects the
way the world is viewed.
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I want next to consider in a more general way what the normative
epistemic lessons might be of this work, and in particular, the concept Mignolo develops as a successor to both epistemology and hermeneutics: border
thinking, or more properly, border gnosis. This concept, as Mignolo develops
it, is not aimed so much at the usual normative epistemic concerns about
justification and belief formation, but rather at the way in which knowledge
is normatively defined in reference to its other(s).
The idea of border thinking is to specify the locality of subaltern
knowledge as a border location rather than simply the beyond of Western
knowledge or the site of pure difference. Situating knowledge and knowers
in a local nonfungible context is revolutionary in itself, going against what
Mignolo refers to as “the ‘normal’ procedure in modern epistemology to
delocalize concepts and detach them from their local histories” (2000b, 41).
Logic, procedures of justification, and the whole range of epistemic virtues
are still generally presented as having universal reach.3
Mignolo’s idea of border thinking can be distinguished from a theory of
situated knowing, such as Donna Haraway or Lorraine Code have developed,
which argues that specifically situated knowers are not interchangeable, because the idea of border thinking is a theory about the epistemic resources
that accompany a very specific site rather than about the limitations that
accrue to every site (in this sense, it is closer to Sandra Harding’s standpoint
theory). The idea of the border has become an overly used trope with vague
and overly broad references, but Mignolo means something very specific having to do with epistemic rupture: “By ‘border thinking’ I mean the moments
in which the imaginary of the modern world system cracks”(2000b, 23).
Border knowledges are thus those that emerged from the encounter itself,
not simply from a local context of any sort. For Mignolo, the concept of the
border is meant to signify that the locality of subaltern knowing, far from
simply being “the other side” of Western knowing, has a border-like quality,
near the West, but not of it entirely, making it reminiscent of Du Bois’s double
consciousness and Leopoldo Zea’s double reality. Positioned at the fissure
or fault-lines of Western hegemony, border thinking already knows from the
start the inherent incoherence of the Western knowledge system, the fact
that it is not a true universal. Mignolo says, “‘Border thinking’ is still within
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the imaginary of the modern world system, but [it has] been repressed” (23).
This location both within and outside confers on it a hybrid, doubled positionality with a capacity for critique in both directions.
That doubled positionality is key to the border’s epistemic resources. If
the subaltern simply champions what the West has disparaged, there is a risk
that what is being championed is a Western construct, represented through
the concepts and imaginary of the colonial world. Yet border thinking is a
“double critique” that implies an ability “to think from both traditions and, at
the same time, from neither of them” (2000b, 67). If border thinking is what
has been repressed from the imaginary of the colonial world-system, then
decolonization should not be understood as a move into an entirely different space but as a transformation “of the rigidity of epistemic and territorial
frontiers established and controlled by the coloniality of power” (12). Part
of the project involves revealing the hybrid character of so-called Western
knowledge itself, not in the sense of an internal debate but more in the sense
that Le Doeuff has argued, that there is a keen rhetorical attentiveness and
mythic content even within the principal domains of logocentrism. Thus
border thinking implies a dissolution of borders or at least a transformation
of how and where they are identified, rather than border control or an approach that would try to accommodate both sides in a plural hermeneutic.
The goal of border thinking is de-subalternizing knowledge itself. This
requires getting at the mechanisms by which knowledges are constructed
as non-knowledges and non-knowledges are constructed as absolute. Here
is where the concepts of gnosis and gnoseology come in. Gnosis is “a term
that would take us away from the confrontation—in Western epistemology,
between epistemology and hermeneutics, between nomothetic and ideographic ‘sciences’—and open up the notion of ‘knowledge’ beyond cultures of
scholarship” (Mignolo 2000b, 9). The contrast between the nomothetic and
the ideographic is the contrast between alphabetic and pictorial based representation, between law-based and exemplar-governed forms of communication, a contrast that played a central role in determining which cultures had
“writing” and which were deemed preliterate, and thus, uncivilized. In reviving the concept of gnoseology, Mignolo does not intend to signify anything
having to do with the heterodox Christian Gnostic movement, although he
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does probably enjoy invoking the association of gnosis with heresy. Rather,
the concept of gnosis at work in his account is that more general concept
that the Gnostics themselves made use of, which involves a more inclusive
concept of knowledge that incorporates both doxa and episteme, both established and unconventional knowledges, both systematic and informal, and
for Mignolo, both dominant and subjugated.
The Greeks defined the project of epistemology through a splitting of doxa
(opinion or mere belief) from episteme (justified belief). Epistemology then
became the theory not of all belief or even of all that is considered knowledge
(what Foucault calls “what passes for truth”), but only of that subset that can
pass the test of justification. But this test is itself constructed by epistemology,
leading to a circularity of reasoning that preempted the possibility of having
an outside critique of epistemology from the sophists, the rhetoricians, or any
discourse defined as outside of the domain of knowledge proper or justified
belief. The sophists, of course, did not see themselves as not being concerned
with knowledge; they simply had a different idea about what knowledge
was, an idea that indexed it to a specific context of public disputation in a
given time and place. Their contextualized account of truth—that truth is
determined as the outcome of a public debate—emphasized human practice
over reference to a transcendent real, and resembles not only contemporary
consensus and pragmatist theories of truth, but also some versions of coherence theories. Nonetheless, this account of truth was not recognized by Plato
or his followers as an alternative theory about the procedure and criterion of
truth, but was instead misrepresented as interested only in persuasion and
thus doxa or mere opinion. The Sophistic approach, as one might imagine,
had its own analysis of Plato’s theory, emphasizing its rhetorical maneuvers,
its conceptual imagery, what we might today call the unconscious of the text,
all of which Plato’s rigid demarcations between episteme and doxa rendered
irrelevant to consider.
In reviving the concept of gnosis and gnoseology, Mignolo intends to avoid
being committed to any given side of this debate, and thus to begin from a
more expansive account of what knowledge might include. By incorporating
rather than rejecting these various traditions of thinking about what knowledge is, gnosis, as he uses the term, includes the possibility of pictographic,
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mimetic, and other forms of knowing—to include all the epistemes, for
example, that Foucault describes in The Order of Things without one superceding, or sublating, the others (1970). The point of this is not to ignore
incoherence or contradiction among all these diverse styles of reasoning, but
to avoid epistemology’s circularity of reasoning by which it defines its own
current doxa about justification as the only legitimate practice, which thus
works to render it immune from external critique and unmotivated toward
dialogue. Gnoseology has no a priori commitments to placing the borders of
knowledge in any given way, thus it can more readily incorporate an analysis
of specific borders, as well as the presumptive preference for borders. Border
thinking is a play on two concepts: the concept of thinking from the border
and thinking about the border.
The fact that gnosis is broader than knowledge, and gnoseology is broader
than epistemology, also has the significant effect of altering the locus of
enunciation or the type of enunciatory space from which knowing can be
imagined to emerge. Think here of the knowledge of midwives—excluded
from having the status of justification because its manner of development was
oral rather than written, among illiterate women rather than learned men,
and often based in personal and shared experience rather than experimental
technique (Dalmiya and Alcoff 1993). Practical, first-person, experientially
based knowledges of all sorts were discredited in the modern period within
the West, in favor of propositional knowledge that could be rendered fully in
linguistic form. Is it a coincidence that the practical knowledge that Aristotle
considered legitimate became forgotten in modern epistemology in the era
of colonial expansion, and that Western scientific techniques alone became
the paradigm of knowing? When the Enlightenment critique of scholasticism effectively circumvented one form of epistemological authoritarianism, another form of authoritarianism had to replace it or else the colonial
masters would have no claim to epistemic supremacy.
Mignolo develops two more ways to contrast border gnosis from contemporary epistemology relevant to this “forgetting” of practical knowledge.
The first involves a contrast between denotative (or roughly, representational) and enactive (or practical) epistemology, and the second involves a
contrast between territorial and border epistemologies. Border thinking, as
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Mignolo develops it, does not have a denotative or representational aim. It
is not focused on an object domain that it wants to “get right,” but on an
epistemic field of operations that it wants to transform. It is also not staking
out a territory (such as the territory of justified true belief) so much as it is
transforming and complexifying the possibilities of spatialization and evaluation across differences. The overall effect of this is something like taking a
practical knowledge approach to epistemology itself, with a concern for the
who and the how as much as for the what.
III. Conclusion
I find these new conceptual approaches very suggestive. In terms of their
normative implications for the doing of epistemology, Mignolo is helpfully
moving us away from the transcendental, imperial, universal formulation of
the project of epistemology. He argues that we need to enlarge the scope of
what epistemology considers, to make it inclusive of both doxa and episteme,
and to destabilize the epistemic weight of these rigid and weighted distinctions. This has the potential to provide a more rigorous, less circular and
flawed, approach to judgment, and it also expands the domain of issues
with which epistemologists should concern ourselves, such as the locus of
enunciation. The project of gnoseology amounts to introducing the idea of
situated epistemologies, it strikes me, thus going beyond Haraway’s idea of
situated knowing to the possibility of localized accounts of best epistemic
practices. Mignolo argues in favor of this meta-approach by thinking through
the conditions of the locality of colonial space and in relation to subaltern
subjectivity. He wants to render the doubled sense of reality that Zea saw
only as a veil or problem as instead an epistemic resource for both imagining
multiplicity as well as invigorating critique.
But I would press Mignolo on two points. The first concerns his notion of
truth. Mignolo rejects the project of reclaiming epistemology and advocates
for the shift to gnoseology, because he sees epistemology as fundamentally
a project that is pursuant of truth, and because he sees truth as necessarily
imperial, territorial, and denotative. But it is difficult to interpret Mignolo’s
own project in any way other than as a project concerned with truth and with
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the way in which the colonial systems of knowing inhibited and precluded
both the understanding and the identification of truth. The denotative approach might have limited application to the shift he has in mind, but there
is still an epistemically based normative distinction operating in his critique
of the coloniality of power.
Take for example Mignolo’s use of Glissant’s concept of diversality, a
concept he contrasts to universality but also to plurality in which alternatives are not in active integration or interaction. Diversality maps differences
as coconstitutive and as potentially integrated, in the way that a bicultural
identity can shift between multiple frames of reference without collapsing the
differences but also without organizing them into hierarchies. As opposed to
imperial resolutions, Glissant wants to maintain the fundamental ambiguity
of colonial identity, that doubled reality that is alive to more than one “here
and now.” This is not merely an ethically or politically motivated alternative
to universality, I want to suggest, but a metaphysically motivated one. It is
an alternative model for conceptualizing subjectivity and knowledge that
might make sense of the existence of many worlds as well as to make visible
their interrelationality and connectedness. This surely has political advantages, but it also can make possible an advance in descriptive adequacy for
pluritopic horizons.
Thus I would contest Mignolo’s claim that truth is out of the picture. And
I would argue against the shift from epistemology to gnoseology (rather than
redefining epistemology) if it is mainly motivated by a desire to dispense
with truth. However, what is important here is not the word we use for the
project so much as retaining the normative epistemic content to the project
of critique and reconstruction that Mignolo and other postcolonialists want
to pursue. If gnoseology can retain the critical and normative dimensions
that aim to improve our understanding of truth, as well as the more inclusive
aims in regard to forms of knowing, then I am on board.
I think there is a similar issue with regard to Mignolo’s treatment of
identity and difference, and which relates to the question I raised earlier
concerning the metaphysical status of the colonial difference. On the one
hand, Mignolo resists the reification of difference and thus emphasizes how
difference is constituted by coloniality. This could lead a reader to imagine
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that for Mignolo, difference a mere epiphenomenon of coloniality. But this is
not his view. The colonial difference is for him a source of critical knowledge
because its content conflicts with dominant knowledges. Thus, difference is
constituted only in part by colonialism: its value and meaning is interpretively constitutued by colonialism, but this is not all there is to the colonial
difference. In other words, it has metaphysical status.
Mignolo’s ambivalence about making this explicit is related to his ambivalence about identity. On the one hand he shies away from identity politics,
but then again he articulates a form of it when he makes such claims as “for
those whom colonial legacies are real (i.e. they hurt), that they are more (logically, historically, and emotionally) inclined than others to theorize the past
in terms of coloniality” (2000b, 115). The concepts of identity and of identity
politics are also assumed in the ongoing project that he defines as “shifting
the geography of reason,” that is, both to motivate the shift and demarcate
its direction. So I would like to see Mignolo work through more precisely and
clearly how he is understanding the concepts of truth and of identity.
Let me end with a point that underscores the significance of Mignolo’s
overall project. The discourse of national independence in Latin America,
much more so than of African liberation discourses, was marked in no small
measure by its acceptance of a Eurocentric frame. Leading thinkers such
as Sarmiento and Alberdi did not contest the modernist macro-narrative
except to the extent it excluded them. The significance of Mignolo’s work,
for me, is the extent of his commitment to contest the status of Eurocentric
metanarratives and refuse the gambit that might work for white male elites
in Latin America but not for anyone else. In attempting to think beyond the
house of modernity, Mignolo has truly built a house of many rooms.
<
notes
1.
And this is true even though he was developing his account of power-knowledge in the
very same period as the lectures on race. In these lectures, race is the locus of operation
for bio-power, it is the target or frame around which bio-power develops, but it is not a
category that organizes knowledge.
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2.
3.
I would note that this is a much more sophisticated epistemology than Scott Michaelson and Scott Cutler Shershow give him credit for in their recent critique (2007). By
their account, he erects a new metaphysically essentialist binary between Europe and
its colonies and he romanticizes Amerindian cultures. However, as this passage makes
clear, Mignolo’s account of what the colonial difference involves rejects transparent
representations of the other.
This essentially positivist approach to knowledge has been effectively critiqued within
both analytic and continental epistemologies, as Quine and Kuhn demonstrated the
paradigm- or theory-specific nature of observation and the phenomenological and
deconstructive movements also targeted the transcendental pretensions of Western
thought. Nonetheless, none of these movements against positivism were reflexive about
the colonial context of the west or the way in which this particular context may have
impacted the development of a paradigm of context-free knowledge.
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